"Rock'n'Roll Scars" Mailing List:
Information for new members
Revised version - March 2006

Rock’n’Roll Scars is an e-mail list for the discussion of Australasian music and popular culture between 1964 and 1975 -- groups, solo artists, recordings, TV, radio, the music scene and pop culture in general. The list is intended to augment the MILESAGO website. We hope you enjoy being a member of the group and look forward to your contributions. Have fun, and post often.

You can choose to receive messages from the list either as single emails, or in a digest format. For more information, or to modify your membership settings, please visit the Rock’n’Roll Scars website on eGroups, or email the moderator.

The list is owned by Duncan Kimball and is moderated and maintained by Narrell Brown, Michael Hunter, Mick Robbins and Duncan Kimball.

To make life a little easier for everyone reading and posting to Rock’n’Roll Scars, we’ve prepared a few suggestions about list etiquette, posting content, and the format and style of submissions. Please take a few minutes to read them.

Please be aware that by joining, you accept the terms and conditions of the Rock'n'Roll Scars list, and that by registering with Yahoo! Groups you also accept their corporate terms and conditions of use.

AS a gerneral rule, we ask that members observe the following reguations and postng suggestions:

The "prime directive" for the moderation of this list is freedom of speech and non-interference in the free flow of posts and debate

We trust our members to act like adults - i.e. responsibly and courteously

Don’t be afraid to ask for help or support if there is anything you don’t understand about using the list, email or the Internet

We have no specific policy about swearing/profanity, but please be aware that strong language might cause offence to some members. Think before you write, but if you feel that a particular word is appropriate, then use it

You are welcome to post "off-topic" information, but please be considerate

If you have information which you believe is of interest to Rock’n’Roll Scars subscribers but is not directly related to the list, try sending a short note to the list asking subscribers to send you e-mail for more information, or post a short message with a URL to a Web page. In other words, give the subscribers a choice -- don't force your message down their collective throat

Before you post questions about Australasian bands or solo artists, please visit the MILESAGO website. For detailed informationon New Zealand music of this period, we strongly recommend a visit to Bruce Sergent's site New Zealand Music of the 60's and 70's. You may find your questions have already been answered there

Try to make sure the subject of your message reflects the content. If you are replying to a message your received as part of the digest version, try not to use the default subject. Rather, change the subject of your posting to refer to the original subject, for example, "Re: Daddy Cool Rules!"

If you want to ask a "general survey" type question, such as "What are your top ten favorite albums of all time?", one solution is to ask everybody to e-mail their answers to you directly. Then summarize responses to the list, if possible. If it is not possible to summarize (for example, how do you summarize Top Ten lists? You don't.) make the answers available on the Web and e-mail them directly to anyone who asks, and post a note to Rock’n’Roll Scars notifying us that the answers are available (include URL and e-mail address)

A good method for surveying member opinion is to use the Polls function on the Rock’n’Roll Scars eGroups site, which posts your poll question to members and enables them to register their vote on the Polls page. If you want to make use of this, please contact the moderator for more information. (Note: access to the Polls page requires internet access)

Please try not to send HTML or Rich Text Format emails to the list. Check the settings of your mail reader application and turn off these options. If you choose the digest option, the software will discard HTML and Rich Text messages (as well as discarding other non-text attachments). Remember, not everybody has a mail reader that can handle fancy messages

If you use a signature (from your ".signature" file), please keep it to four lines of text or fewer. Your e-mail address already appears in the header of your posting, so no need to repeat it in your signature. Please avoid using messages that might offend or annoy other readers

Try to keep the length of the lines in your message to 75 characters or less. The standard width of a terminal screen is 80 characters, but when a reply includes your message, the length of lines can grow, so leave a little room for further discussion

If you are replying to a message and quoting text , please try to edit the included text down to the minimum necessary to convey the gist of what you wish to reply to. The full message can always be retrieved or referred to on the list website

If you are quoting from or reproducing copyright material, please respect the rights of the creators -- get permission, if required, and acknowledge the source

Please do not send binary files to the list. If you have an image or a sound file you wish to share, place it in a public WWW or FTP space. If you do not have access to such a space, I will consider placing it on the list space, or on the MILESAGO site

Please turn message acknowledgement off (Pegasus users take note). The list is not interested in knowing when you read your mail

When someone asks a question, many people send out identical answers. When this happens, you can get dozens of identical answers. Consider mailing your answer to the person and suggest that they summarize to the list. This way the list will only see a single copy of the answers, no matter how many people answer the question. And if you post a question, please remind people to send you the answers by mail and at least offer to summarize them to the list

When you request information from the list, it is common courtesy to report your findings so that others can benefit as well. The best way of doing this is to take all the responses that you received and edit them into a single article that can be sent to the list. Take the time to strip headers, combine duplicate information, and write a short summary. Try to credit the information to the people that sent it to you, where possible

White space is not wasted space -- it greatly improves clarity. A blank line only adds a byte to the length of your message, so don't be stingy if it will help make your meaning clearer.

Racist or sexist language, or any other form of derogatory, defamatory, abusive or vilifying comment

The posting or distribution of any form of offensive or sexually explicit materiaL

Use of the list for private commercial gain

Trading in or sale of illegal (‘pirate’) sound or video recordings (MP3 files, tapes, CD-R, etc), deliberate infringement of copyright, or any other illegal act
(Please see below for a discussion on the trading issue.)

Trading in "pirate" copies of music recordings is a thorny issue, especially in relation to Australian recordings of the '60s and '70s. We cannot condone the illegal duplication of copyright material, and we must remind members that besides breaking the law, such actions only compound the sins committed against our musicians, many of whom have never seen any financial return whatsoever from their commercial recordings.

But we recognize that many of our members are passionate fans and collectors of Australian music, and that one of the major problems facing us is that only a tiny portion of the material recorded during that time is currently available on CD, and that vinyl copies of many Australian recordings are now becoming increasingly rare and commensurately more expensive.

Many important Australiasian albums and singles have never been transferred to CD, and in many cases the original vinyl recordings are now extremely rare and command commensurately high prices on the collectors market. Good examples of this are Company Caine’s Doctor Chop LP, and the Sons Of The Vegetal Mother Garden Party EP -- in both cases only about 250 copies were ever pressed. CD versions of recordings by major acts like The Twilights, Spectrum, Company Caine and Tully are still not available -- indeed with the exception of a few scattered "Best Of" compilation albums, most major recordings by these pivotal Aussie bands have ever been officially issued on CD to our knowledge.

Of the major record labels, only the now-defunct Festival Mushroom group made any comprehensive attempt to restore and reissue its back-catalogue of Australian 60s and 70s music, and they are to be applauded for their efforts. The other major companies stand condemned by their own inertia and carelessness. Lamentably, it appears to be a consistent pattern that master tapes and multitracks of important recordings by major Aussie acts have already been lost or destroyed. For recordings made by these other companies, consumers are mainly reliant on specialist reissue labels like Raven, Vicious Sloth and Canetoad, whose resources are necessarily limited.

The most important development to hit the music scene since the inception of MILESAGO and the Scars list is the advent of domestic digital recording technology, which has created a large and growing trade in non-commercial material, such as live and private recordings, which has been greatly facilitated by the advent of low-cost CD-R burning equipment.

Our policies are always under review, but we ask subscribers to observe the following guidelines. We welcome and encourage any feedback on these issues and will review and change our policies where necessary.

The general list policy is that use of the list for trading in illegal (pirate) copies of copyright material is strictly prohibited, as is use of the list for any form of sale of any item for commercial gain. Any such action will result in immediate banning.

We consider private trading between members in non-commercial, non-copyright CD-Rs, tape recordings or videos as a matter between those individuals. However, all such trading should be conducted strictly off-list, and we ask that all subscribers respect the copyright of the creators and owners where they are known to subsist.

If you have any material that you wish to trade -- for example, a rare, privately-made live or 'off-air' tape of a group or artist -- we encourage you to seriously consider donating two copies of your recording to ScreenSound (formerly the National Film and Sound Archive) in Canberra. Other options include the National Library of Australia in Canberra, the State Library in your capital city and other institutions like the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.

It is regrettable that, unlike the rules governing Australian film, there is no policy of compulsory donations governing Australian sound recordings. Screensound relies on the goodwill of record companies, radio stations and private donors, and consequently the national archive is a haphazard collection, where much important popular music of the last 50 years is not represented.

Likewise, if you have other important material -- extra copies of rare or important commercial recordings, sheet music, rare photographs, posters, badges, items of clothing or other memorabilia -- why not contact ScreenSound and at least see if they already have a copy?

We want to stress that ScreenSounds holdings are not locked away in a vault, never to be seen again -- the archive has an active policy of preservation, restoration and distribution. Copies of many of their audio-visual holdings can be purchased at a reasonable cost.

Another excellent home for rare stuff is the Performing Arts Museum in Melbourne, which has a large and growing collection of priceless documents and materials like the 30,000-item Laurie Richards photography collection, Noel Crombie’s costumes for Split Enz, and all the documents relating to the epochal 1964 Australian tour by The Beatles, donated by the promoter, the late Kenn Brodziak.

Such institutions are worthy recipients for any such donation and you would have the satisfaction of knowing that your gift will go towards creating a national collection for the benefit of future generations

WHAT ABOUT THE WORKERS?

If you have rare recordings or other material, we also strongly encourage members to use the network of contacts around the list and the MILESAGO website to provide copies of any such material to the original artist/s who created them. In most cases, artists can be contacted relatively easily, and in our experience they would be delighted to receive copies of this kind of thing.

The regrettable fact is that many Australian musicians of the '60s and '70s (and beyond) do not have complete collections of even their own official recordings, let alone ‘bootleg’ live tapes, concert photos, etc.

We consider it a matter of courtesy that members should try to contact the artist/s (where possible) and provide them with copies of such material. We are mindful of copyright provisions, but in the absence of official releases, we consider it the lesser of two evils if members want to privately copy commercial material, as long it to be provided to the musician/s who created it, when that artist does not possess a copy (or a good copy) of the work in question.

Most of these suggestions were cribbed wholesale from John Relph's excellent Posting and Style Guidelines page on the XTC Chalkhills website. Thanks John!